Optimizing Compound Retrieval Systems
Harrie Oosterhuis, Rolf Jagerman, Zhen Qin, Xuanhui Wang · 2025
Modern retrieval systems do not rely on a single ranking model to construct their rankings. Instead, they generally take a cascading approach where a sequence of ranking models are applied in multiple re-ranking stages. Thereby, they balance the quality of the top-K ranking with computational costs by limiting the number of documents each model re-ranks. However, the cascading approach is not the only way models can interact to form a retrieval system.